o EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
which sought to degrade the Living God into a human idea or to divide Him into mythical opponent deities, whose prey was the world. Nevertheless human differences made one the antithesis of the other in a number of ways. Tertullian was of a passionate and unsettled nature, unable by reason of his very gifts to acquire form or to give form to other things. The flame which consumed him blew hither and thither, seeking victims for his combative passion. Retiring into himself he could write most beautifully about patience, yet it is just as if a sick man were talking of health. The sensory world was his element, so much so that for him, too, the eternal spirit of God was inconceivable apart from a body. On the other hand the manner in which everything spiritual is tangled up with the flesh Carthage, the heathen atmosphere, the bedraggled world which had pushed itself through the gates of the Church aroused in him a feverish longing for escape from the realm of sense. And so he (like so many of his followers) looked back longingly at the pure simplicity of the primitive. The beginnings of the Christian world had already become so remote that a romantic spirit could be tempted to yearn for the true and im- maculate greatness of yesterday. This romanticism struggled in Ter- tullian's soul with a rationalism which recognized the necessity of historical development.
In powerful, brilliant apologies for Christianity and in calmly rea- soned tracts against heresy, he took heed of the imperfection of all earthly things, which since they have been created have the defects that are inherent in the process of becoming, and urged patience in the presence of God who lets ripen for us through the seasons what in Him- self, who is hidden from our view, is already finished and perfected. Yet Tertullian the thinker did not prevail in the end over Tertullian the man of passion. He cursed heathenism but also came to blows with the Church of his day. He detested the dead weight of human nature that was so obvious in the Church's structure. With Stoic faith he had sensed the divine nerve of the cosmos. He had written the immortally great dictum that the soul is naturally Christian. But now he refused to be patient with the moment in Christian history contemporary with himself. He yearned to fling the wheel of time back to the glory of Christian origins, or hurry forward toward the
TERTULLIAN
